A former Countrywide and Bank of America executive named by Justice Department lawyers as facilitating a scheme to defraud Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now heads JPMorgan Chase's involvement in the Independent Foreclosure Review.

Last month, the government released information on the compensation victims of the banks’ foreclosure practices might receive. For homeowners, it turns out that it’s crucially important just how the bank messed up.

A new report says borrowers who want to refinance mortgages under the government’s expanded Home Affordable Refinancing Program, or HARP, may not be getting the lowest rates because there’s little incentive for big banks to compete for business.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae's opposition to principal reductions on mortgages means about half of homeowners in the U.S. couldn't qualify for the most significant help from banks' settlement today with states.

The Independent Foreclosure Review seeks to compensate homeowners victimized by big banks, but key elements remain undecided, unclear or secret, while lawmakers and homeowner advocates have criticized some of the known features.

Federal Housing Finance Agency chief Edward DeMarco had blocked earlier efforts to help struggling homeowners, but now he’s signed onto a major change to encourage banks to refinance underwater mortgages.

An internal document obtained by ProPublica shows that when one of the nation's largest mortgage servicers sought to foreclose on a homeowner last year and lacked a crucial document, they just made one up.

After two years of arguing that it had little power to punish banks for breaking the rules of its mortgage modification program, the administration has decided it’s finally time to crack down. But the punishment won’t do much damage to banks that count their profits in the billions.

The recent budget deal struck between Republicans and Democrats would slash funding for housing counseling, a move that advocates say would force counseling agencies to lay off staff amid the foreclosure crisis.

The suit is a window into a broken system where even though the actual investors, when asked, say they want to allow mortgage modifications, the bank that acts as their representative has refused to allow them.

Banking regulators have launched a process for banks to compensate homeowners who faced wrongful foreclosures in 2009 and 2010. Please help us report on this by sharing your experiences with our reporter, Paul Kiel.

Hosts of federal agencies and regulators, along with the 50 state attorneys general, are hard at work on laying out new rules for banks and mortgage servicers. But attempts to reform this process have failed before. Will banks abusing the system be held accountable?

Federal regulators say they're going to crack down after finding "critical deficiencies" with how banks and mortgage servicers have been handling struggling homeowners. But it's an open question just what form a punishment will take.

The Obama administration’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program known as HAMP has been weakened, perhaps fatally, by a posture of cooperation—rather than enforcement—with the nation’s biggest banks.

In a scandal that's ballooned in scope since the initial discovery of robo-signers, we review the status of investigations into foreclosure fraud, how courts are handling the mess and what solutions are on the horizon.

The U.S. government's effort to help struggling homeowners from defaulting on their mortgages is approaching a standstill, and the number of homeowners in ongoing mortgage modifications could start shrinking.

New numbers show the administration’s mortgage modification program (HAMP) continues to struggle, while government officials say the banks’ flawed foreclosure practices should draw even more attention to their poor record in the handling of homeowners seeking modifications.